


Finding a Home

by worrylesswritemore



Category: Falsettos - Lapine/Finn
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, F/M, Follows the plot but with soulmates added in, M/M, Stream of Consciousness, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2017-06-12
Packaged: 2018-11-13 06:57:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11179452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/worrylesswritemore/pseuds/worrylesswritemore
Summary: Marvin finds his in the dark alley of a seedy bar; Trina finds hers in the office of her ex-husband's psychiatrist; Jason finds his outside of a coffee shop.:: - ::AU in which you identify your soulmate based on whether they smell like home.





	Finding a Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ciaowhizzer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ciaowhizzer/gifts).



> This was a fill for a prompt posted on my other fic, Days Like This. However, I really, really liked it, so I thought that I'd make it into its own one-shot. It's a really weird concept that I came up with because I couldn't find a soulmate prompt that I thought would fit into this musical. I hope you understand/like the concept as much as I do!  
> Dedicated to ciaowhizzer, who gave me this awesome prompt in the first place. It was definitely out of my comfort zone and I applaud you for making me try something at least a little sci-fi/fantasy. I really hope that you like it.

                                                                                **Marvin**

Home smells of white carpet soaked with expensive wine, expresso beans overcooking in the coffee pot, a gently used Cuban cigar.

It’s the home of strangers—a dispassionate mother, a disheartened father, a dissatisfied son. To the son, home is a prison of isolation, thick white walls where he can scream and bark and act out, only be met with detached sentiments of reproach. The son leaves as soon as he turns eighteen, determined to get the scent of lipstick and cologne out of his system.

The son—Marvin, of course—marries young and reluctant, a consequence of his bride’s swollen belly. Trina smells like fresh linen and bleach, and she wakes him with a kiss every morning and makes his breakfast.

And she doesn’t smell like _his_ home, but she smells like one that he’s always wanted—clean, wholesome, _perfect_.

“When are you coming home tonight?” Trina asks, standing over beside him and refreshing his cup of coffee. Her voice is carefully pitched, the barbed edge unnoticed by their son but unmistakable in Marvin’s ears. He feels her eyes on him, daring him, begging him, _burning him._

He doesn’t give her the satisfaction of meeting her pointed gaze, simply responding, “Late again. I’m squeezing in an extra session with Mendel after work.”

“Alright. Here, you’re finished? Let me take up your plate.” When she reaches for the empty platter, Marvin stiffens and reflexively grabs her wrist, examining the tiny cuts that decorate her palm.

“What did you do?”

She firmly jerks her hand out of his grasp, but her voice remains airy and sweet, “I had to clean up the vase you _dropped_ , Honey. I didn’t want Jason or you to cut yourselves on the shards.” He shoves the memory of their fight deep into the back of his mind, along with all the others. Even still, her slight causes shame to burn his cheeks.

“You didn’t treat it,” Marvin states tersely, abruptly standing up and walking towards the kitchen cabinets, “Jesus, Trina, do you want an infection?” He rummages through them until he finally finds the rubbing alcohol. He grabs a dish towel and walks back over to the table, beckoning Trina to sit down with feigned exasperation. Always so _docile_ —so _eager_ to please, she sits immediately. Marvin squats down and takes her hands into his own, carefully dabbing the alcohol on the cuts and whispering encouragements in response to her every hiss of pain.

When he’s done, he looks up at her, putting on his best apologetic smile, “Better?”

“A little.” Her smile is small and reluctant, but Marvin knows through experience that he’s been forgiven.

“Well, I should go,” Marvin straightens back up and glances at his watch, “I’ll try to make it home before you two go to bed, alright?” He kisses Trina’s hands and passes Jason on the way out of the room, giving him a pat on the shoulder.

“You have that spelling test today, right?” Marvin asks, miraculously pulling that from his brain.

Jason nods, keeping his gaze trained on his soggy cereal. _Seems like he’s already at the moody-teenager phase at just nine-years-old._

“You’ll get a one hundred,” He says, more as a statement of fact rather than a display of encouragement, “I mean, I didn’t help you make those flash-cards for nothing.”

Jason continues to seem unimpressed, “Thanks, Dad.”

Marvin drops his briefcase and holds open his arms, “Give your dad a hug before he leaves?” Small arms wrap around his neck as Marvin buries his head in the crook of his son’s neck, subconsciously breathing him in. Jason smells like fresh ink and lemon sours, smart and promising yet slightly acidic.

He pulls away and studies Jason’s small face, only to find the eyes of himself at that age staring back at him—misery, closed off, resentment.

Marvin feels shame once again flood his system, so he does what he does best.

He leaves.

:: - ::

After work, he reschedules his therapy session and goes to a bar instead. Never comfortable in these clothes—in this _skin_ , Marvin picks at a fraying thread in his sleeve anxiously, only speaking to the bartender when he needs his tall glass topped off. And it’s no way to spend a Wednesday night, not for a man like him. He’s supposed to try to make it home for dinner on time and kiss his wife and ask about his son’s day. But then again, is he really like that man or is he just playing _house_ again, as if he’s seven-years-old?

He pretends not to know why he comes to this bar, of all places. Sure, he lies to even himself about it, thinking of empty excuses like _no one from my other life will recognize me here_ or _I won’t be tempted to commit adultery if a pretty girl smiles at me._

Nevertheless, Marvin sits at the bar and drinks his beer and looks at all the men.  

:: - ::

His name is Whizzer Brown and he’s coy to give up anything else about himself and his hand has been inching up Marvin’s thigh the second that he sat next to him.

“Buy me a drink.” The man requests with a salacious grin and Marvin shouldn’t, but the man is really _pretty_ , with pink lips and thick eyelashes. Marvin does as he’s told, shifting in his seat but unable to commit to shaking off the hand on his thigh.

It’s loud in here and too crowded for anything more than a half-assed, tipsy invitation. They end up screwing in the back alley of that bar with Whizzer’s hands in his hair and Marvin’s hands on his hips. It’s only when he’s about to finish—when he buries his face in the crook of Whizzer’s neck and inhales shakily, a cry on his lips—that he comes across something incredible.

Whizzer smells like expensive wine, burnt expresso coffee, Cuban cigars.

When he pulls out, he looks at Whizzer with stunned amazement and horror. The man looks just as shocked and disgusted, holding a hand over his nose as if that could change anything.

They go to a coffee shop and try to talk it out, but it soon devolves into insulting shouts and dry humping in the men’s bathroom. Marvin thinks he might already be in love.

 

                                                                                **Trina**

Surprisingly, the days go on without him.

It’s not like she really misses Marvin or anything—living with him was like walking on a field of landmines, fearing that any misstep could be her last. It’s better, she tries to tell herself, that he’s shacking up with some tramp and leaving her to her own devices. Trina is free to do anything she wants.

However, there lies her exact dilemma: freedom. She doesn’t want it, never had really. She let her father guide her in all her decisions, the loving but strong hand on her shoulder. Then it was Marvin who trapped her, with his biting remarks for her to ignore and hoops for her to jump through and obvious unhappiness to live with. She’s never been alone, now that she thinks about it.

It terrifies her.

To her, home had smelled like peach cobbler and dish soap and clean towels. Marvin had smelled of burnt sugar and lemon sours, always burning her nose and putting a sour taste in her mouth.

But it was enough. To her, he was enough.

Obviously, this feeling too had been unrequited.

:: - ::

The thought of killing herself comes absently, when she’s drawing a bath for Jason and thinks about sticking her head underwater and breathing deep. Trina snaps out of it, of course; she leaves the bathroom as soon as she’s finished and beckons Jason to get in. As the boy passes her, Trina gets a whiff of his scent—expired chocolate, stale bubblegum, burnt sugar.

He reminds her so much of Marvin that, if she stops catching herself, she might start to hate him a little, too.

:: - ::

Whizzer had smelled of hard candy and cheap liquor. And, more often than not, her husband’s cologne, but that scent had not been permanent and likely due to the fact that he would screw Marvin behind locked doors right before sitting down and having dinner with his family.

Even after the divorce, Marvin forces them to eat together at least once a week. They all smile and say things that don’t matter and pretend that it isn’t as painful as a knife in the back.

Trina looks at the butter knife in her hand and starts shaking, the idle thought of slitting her wrists becoming less idle by the day.

:: - ::

She goes to see him after much pressing from Marvin. Even now, her ex-husband tries to control her, have that guiding hand on her shoulder that is starting to feel like a fist around her throat. However, she would rather feel choked than alone any day, so Trina doesn’t complain.

She walks into his office on a late afternoon, after she’s gotten off from work and dropped Jason off at home. She’s just going to stay a little while, she bargains with herself, long enough to see what to do about the increasingly wild child that has inhabited Jason’s body. She knows that she looks like sort of a mess, with her hair frizzing and lipstick sloppily redone in the car. Catching sight of her face in the mirror, Trina can’t help but see her as some sort of clown.

The man is short and curly-haired, looking like he was dragged kicking and screaming from the sixties and now resentfully resides in the present age of almost two decades later. He’s cute, she absently notices, but she’s more focused on keeping her hands from shaking when she sees the pointed letter opener on his desk.

Mendel stands to greet her as she approaches him, outstretching his hand in a friendly manner. It’s when she gets close to him that she absently breathes in, trying to steady her nerves. And he smells so _familiar_.

Neither letting go of the other’s hand, Trina and Mendel stare wondrously at each other, the outside world dropping away and leaving them suspended in each other’s gaze.

 

                                                                                **Jason**

He was taught that your soulmate smells of home. Throughout his life, Jason absently looks for some pretty girl to smell of his mother’s bitter or his father’s acidity. For at least nine years of his life, home had felt like a warzone and Jason was the neutral area that was threatening to be invaded at any moment. Of course, his home has changed since then, split into two and became less volatile. But no one has smelled of the insufferable warmth of Trina and Mendel’s home, or the sickeningly sweet aroma of Marvin and Whizzer’s home, or even the refreshing zest of citrus in Charlotte and Cordelia’s home. He doesn’t know which home his soulmate will embody, nor what it will mean about his familial ties. Are they strong with his mother and step-father, his father and his friend, the lesbians next door?

At twelve years of age, Jason feels every single emotion at once—hopelessness, excitement, rage, bitterness, _fear_.

But then Whizzer dies, and Jason stops feeling altogether.

:: - ::

He’s twenty-five when he gets his answer.

By that time, Marvin has been dead for a decade, Whizzer stealing him away with a kiss in yet another hospital room. Mendel and Trina drive him crazy with all their fretting and hovering, so he still finds solace in the house of the lesbians. Cordelia doesn’t smile as often or deeply as she used to, but she still lets him help bake pies and roasts for her business. Charlotte is like a ghost of her former self, the disease stealing away her passion just as it did her friends. Jason knows what it’s called now, of course. The name is hollow in his mouth though, so he still continues to call it _Dad-Killer_ and gets into street brawls every time he sees picketing signs that tell them that they deserved it.

He meets a pretty girl when he’s coming out of a coffee shop and runs into her, spilling his coffee all down the front of her blouse.

“Jesus, I’m sorry.” Jason tries to say without stammering, the unexpected human interaction causes his body to light up in anxiety.

“It’s fine,” The girl says with a pained expression, averting her eyes as well as she stares at the sidewalk pavement, “I should have…” She stops abruptly and tenses, finally looking at him with wide eyes.

He starts to ask what her deal is when he absently takes in a breath, immediately getting his answer.

To Jason, home apparently smells of a small hospital room of seven people—a jaded twelve-year-old, a wiry psychiatrist, a neurotic mother, a spiteful father, a shiksa caterer, a warm doctor, a mean pretty boy with a heart of gold—and poorly seasoned, slightly burnt food prepared for a bar mitzvah.

And he guesses that home is really what you make of it.

**Author's Note:**

> (Wow, self, way to literally spell out the theme of the one-shot for them; I think they can read between the lines).   
> Really hope that you liked it! (Side-note: did you also notice that, with the exception of the soulmates, the other character's smell like how the narrator feels about them? That's why Jason smells differently to Marvin and Trina, why Whizzer smells differently to Marvin and Trina, etc. I worked really hard on coming up with those).  
> Comments would really assure me that I didn't waste my time on this.


End file.
